<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>A Lifetime of Pomegranates by scioscribe</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25178038">A Lifetime of Pomegranates</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe'>scioscribe</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Torchwood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alien Food Processors, Gen, Undead Owen Harper</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:00:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,098</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25178038</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There's an alien food processor that might give Owen the chance to have a good meal again, dead or not--if it would just fall through the Rift already.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Owen Harper &amp; Torchwood Team, Owen Harper &amp; Toshiko Sato</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Eat Drink and Make Merry 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Lifetime of Pomegranates</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts">Edonohana</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Do we have it yet?” Tosh said.</p><p>“You ask that every morning now,” Jack said. “I don’t like being put in a position where I have to constantly fall below someone else’s expectations; it’s very new for me. No, we don’t have it. I can’t <em>make </em>things drift through Rift, you get that, right?”</p><p>She tacked the edges of her smile in place. It wasn’t Jack’s fault, of course. “I suppose I’ve gotten used to you being able to do the impossible.”</p><p>“Ah, flattery. You really do know the way to my heart.” He met her eyes. “But you don’t need that, not now. Trust me, this is already there.”</p><p>It had taken Tosh a long time to realize it, but the really glorious thing about Jack was that underneath all the boasting and play and the hard-bitten stances, he had a sincerity so deep and simple it was almost shocking. Even more than his stories, that made her feel like he really was from another time, a time where they’d learned for sure how to be genuine without it ever seeming cheap.</p><p>“I know,” she said. “I’m just impatient.”</p><p>“You and me both. But Martha’s keeping an eye out for us over at UNIT, and I put up a flag for the Doctor, too. For him this’d be the equivalent of running to the corner for a carton of milk—and you wouldn’t think a man with a time machine would tend to run late, but—” He shrugged. “It’ll happen. Two government agencies and a Time Lord, we ought to be able to turn up a Troxian food processor.”</p><p>True. One had to fall into their laps sooner or later. (Hopefully theirs instead of UNIT's, no matter how much she trusted Martha.) She just wished the Rift would <em>cooperate</em>, but it wasn’t really known for that. One long summer, the ceiling fan in her bedroom had broken, and the heat had kept her too restless to sleep. Some sort of alien AC would’ve been very welcome, and what had the Rift tossed at them? Great fleecy mittens from the 45<sup>th</sup> century, the whole of July. And this was no different except, as Jack had said, it hit closer to her heart.</p><p>What Jack had remembered about the Troxi—what had led to Tosh popping into his office first thing every day—was that they had sharply defined stages of life. Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly. And in the final stage of their lives, they were—like Owen. Or at least as much like Owen as anything in the universe had turned out to be so far.</p><p>All the anatomical processes the Troxi had relied on up until then shut down. They had two hearts, and both of them stopped beating and never started again. Their temperature no longer rose above the ambient. They were dead—and she hated using that word for it, and she hated <em>twice </em>as much how Owen flung it around, flaunting it like another broken finger—but not.</p><p>And they could eat. The Troxi who were like Owen could eat and properly digest, even though they didn’t need to. Something about it being a matter of preparation.</p><p>So incredibly, frustratingly vague—“Most species don’t like to give detailed biology lessons during their morning-afters,” Jack had said. “She was mostly just telling me what coffeemaker to use”—but enough to hang a few hopes on.</p><p>Her hopes. <em>Their </em>hopes—her and Jack and Ianto and Gwen. She hadn’t dared tell Owen yet. No need for him to be crushed if they never found it or if they found it and it didn’t work.</p><p>But if it did work, Owen could get back a little bit of what he’d lost.</p><p>Appropriately enough, she came back out into the main part of the Hub to see Owen watching Ianto drink coffee.</p><p>This had turned into part of the daily routine, too. When they had takeaway or tea or a bag of crisps, when there was anything at all around to eat or drink, Owen would either slip away or stare at them the entire time.</p><p>(“One way we all feel bad and the other we all feel uncomfortable,” Gwen had said, summing it up. “I suppose it might as well be us feeling like we’re on display.”)</p><p>“This is pornographic,” Ianto said, lowering his cup.</p><p>Owen offered maybe a quarter of his old smirk. “Yeah, and you love it.”</p><p>“I said you could watch. I didn’t say I wanted to feel like I’m in a brothel window in Amsterdam.”</p><p>“Yeah, well, six of one.”</p><p>Ianto rolled his eyes and took another drink. “It needs a bit more sugar anyhow. I was trying a new free trade blend, and it runs bitter.”</p><p>“All right,” Owen said grudgingly. “Go get your sugar, just don’t drink a drop of that while you’re gone.”</p><p>“Or I do whatever I like and I win back your affections by getting a Mars bar this afternoon.”</p><p>“I don’t do affection, and it had better be a <em>proper </em>Mars bar, not one of the ones you half-arse peddle upstairs. Old chocolate always looks like it needs dusting.”</p><p>Ianto glanced at Tosh just deliberately enough that she knew to follow him, mumbling something about how she fancied a cuppa too.</p><p>When they were out of everyone else’s earshot, Tosh said, “You always tell him what things taste like.” He did it subtly enough—or what Ianto would say was subtle for Torchwood, anyway—but she had noticed it before, too.</p><p>Ianto looked a little embarrassed at being caught out about it. “I didn’t know at first if he’d like it or just think I was—flaunting what he couldn’t have. But he does seem in favor, on the whole, so I kept it up. I thought he still has the memories, in any case, so maybe recalling them is worth something.” He put his cup down and selected another sugar cube. “You were in with Jack. Did the tech turn up?”</p><p>“No. Not yet.” She smiled. “You know, I only live round the block from Kitchen Economy. I never thought before how convenient that is. If I need a cheese grater or a lemon zester—it’s just there. Only of course I don’t cook much.”</p><p>“I doubt any of us do.”</p><p>Gwen came in, making a beeline for the coffee and hunkering over her cup until it was at least halfway drunk. Then she came to life a little: “You doubt any of us do what?”</p><p>“Cook,” Ianto said succinctly.</p><p>“Oh, I do dinners together with Rhys sometimes.” She took another long drink and then frowned. “Though come to think of it he does always tell me I’ve had a long day and it’s fine to not do too much and I could just make up the salad. Shit. Maybe you’re right. Oh, did the—"</p><p>“It hasn’t come yet,” Tosh said.</p><p>“Pity.” She brightened around cup two. “Though, you know, it does give us time to decide what to make, if we can cobble together enough kitchen experience. Tosh, you know him best, you must know what he likes.”</p><p>Encyclopedically, probably. “But we don’t even know yet how it will work, if it even does. If we can rig it to be compatible with Earth-native food, if it’s not already, it might still turn everything into a giant protein shake or a little pill.”</p><p>"Or Soylent Green."</p><p>“Spoilsports,” Gwen said.</p><p>Owen must have finally gotten fed up with waiting for his one-on-one coffee show to come back, because he ambled in and gave them all a disgusted glare before dropping down onto the sofa. He had a packet of crisps with him, something he must have scrounged up from the back of a desk drawer, and he’d opened it up and was taking each one out and pinching it until it fell apart into salty little crumbs. That hardly counted as the best sign Tosh had ever seen. The worst part was he didn’t even look angry. He didn’t look like anything at all.</p><p>The rest of the day was taken up by the discovery that a snack cake factory had been using alien byproducts to produce its artificial crème. Not one of the most exciting cases they’d ever worked, but perhaps the most disgusting—“Makes you feel a bit better about the cannibals, doesn’t it?” Gwen said, looking a little green, and Tosh thought she might agree. By the time they all got back to the Hub again, they were goo-spattered and exhausted. All Tosh wanted to do was wash alien crème out of her hair and collapse somewhere. Even Owen, who couldn’t sleep, had turned spacy and aimless on them, and Tosh was betting he could do with a chance to just curl up in front of the telly.</p><p>But Ianto flagged her down right away, his nose wrinkling a bit as he got a whiff of the crème.</p><p>“Why didn’t you have to go out on this one?” she said.</p><p>“I predicted the mess. Listen, it came. The Troxian—thing. It looks a bit like a cheese grater, actually.”</p><p>Tosh just barely kept herself from lighting up in a way that, after the day they’ve had, would have attracted way too much attention, even from a glassy-eyed Owen. “That’s terrific. I can experiment with it tonight—”</p><p>“You should go to <em>bed</em> tonight. It’ll still be here in the morning. Granted the Rift doesn’t snake it out of our hands in a quick take-back.”</p><p>She knew he was right.</p><p>But she also knew where he kept the latest artifact arrivals, and since anticipation would have kept her up anyway, she made her way back to the Hub after her shower. (Three shampoos to get out all the crème, and she would never have another Hostess cake in her <em>life</em>.) She would just take the alien cheese grater out of the archives for a quick peek and a few test runs—God knew what they had stocked in the cupboards these days, but she could make do—and tomorrow she would be all ready to whip up something—</p><p>And Jack and Ianto had beaten her to it. They were standing side-by-side in the little kitchenette, Jack’s hair still damp from his shower, Ianto with a dish towel tucked into his trousers as an improvised apron.</p><p>“You’re doing it wrong.”</p><p>“You did it once, centuries ago. How do you know that I’m doing it wrong?”</p><p>“Because if you were doing it right, presumably it would be working.”</p><p>“If you’d care to have a go any time now …”</p><p>“No,” Jack said, with a grin in his voice. “Part of my leadership strategy is to just stand by and offer color commentary.”</p><p>Tosh cleared her throat. When they turned around, Ianto at least had the grace to look guilty.</p><p>“Sorry,” he said. “I know I said you shouldn’t stay, but Jack couldn’t resist getting started fiddling with it, and I thought I might as well join in.”</p><p>Tosh smiled. “Feels like Christmas morning, doesn’t it? Everyone crowded around trying to make the new toy work. I take it you <em>haven’t </em>made it work yet?”</p><p>“No.” Ianto glared at the food processor—it was an unexpected kind of neon burgundy that Tosh had never imagined could exist—as if it were personally failing him.</p><p>“And we still don’t even know if whatever refining this does will make anything Owen will find tolerable. It could be poisonous to humans.”</p><p>“Or taste like grass,” Ianto said.</p><p>“So long as it tastes like <em>anything</em> to him, that might be fine,” Tosh said. She rolled up her sleeves. “Let’s give it a try.”</p><p>The next few hours were a long exercise in feeding things through the processor and examining the results. Mostly it just kept coming out the other end again unchanged, because no matter what they did, the machine wouldn’t seem to turn on. They spent an hour earnestly looking about for some sort of charging port or battery, in case it was simply out of power. Nothing.</p><p>Then she noticed that Jack’s hair had dried a bit messy, in spikes, and she wondered if he maybe hadn’t gotten all the crème scrubbed out, and then she realized something in a flash.</p><p>“We should try something more natural. We’ve been feeding it bits of junk, vending machine food, because that’s most of what we have on hand, but maybe it doesn’t recognize that. It’s too processed already. Do we have anything fresher?”</p><p>“Milk,” Ianto said, and he zipped to the fridge and back. “Pasteurized, of course, but that level of processing has to be mild compared to the crisps and Jaffa cakes. Here, hold a cup beneath it and I’ll pour.”</p><p>Tosh held, and Ianto poured.</p><p>The milk streamed through the processor and came out as a doughnut.</p><p>Tosh almost dropped the cup.</p><p>“It’s a doughnut,” Ianto said.</p><p>“Looks like cinnamon-sugar,” Jack added. “Anyone want to taste it?”</p><p>“Could we even digest it?” Tosh said. “If it’s meant for someone like Owen?”</p><p>“You twenty-first century people, so unadventurous.”</p><p>She found a pair of chopsticks in one of the drawers and maneuvered the doughnut up out of the cup, looking at it from all angles. It wasn’t <em>quite </em>a doughnut—its hole was really more of a deep, diamond-shaped dimple—but it was close, and it was, as Jack had already spotted, dusted with a kind of fine, grainy powder.</p><p>“Food of the dead,” Jack said, studying it. “Maybe I’m close enough to qualify, at least for a test run.”</p><p>Ianto pressed his lips together. “Be careful,” he said finally.</p><p>“Believe me, I don’t my legacy to be dying while eating a doughnut.” Jack kissed the corner of Ianto’s mouth briefly and gave Tosh a rakish grin. “Here goes nothing.” He plucked it off Tosh’s chopsticks and popped it into his mouth whole. He closed his eyes, jaw moving, and then swallowed. “Not exactly milky, if you ask me. Not that I could tell anyway. The whole taste gets a little subsumed under the tingling; makes me feel like I stuck an electrode on my tongue.”</p><p>“Here.” Ianto filled a fresh mug with water and passed it over to him. “You can rinse.”</p><p>Jack did, and then he said, “I don’t know if Owen will like it or not, however it tastes to him, but it’s worth a try. In the end, I’ve still got all the typical human equipment in good working order, even if it gets a hard restart every once in a while. It’s not a fair comparison. Maybe it’s a little more hopeful that it <em>didn’t </em>strike me as the ideal breakfast, when you think about it.”</p><p>“We won’t be able to test it properly, will we?” Tosh had so wanted to present Owen with a <em>fait accompli</em>, a present without a work-in-progress sticker on it. “We’ll just have to try it with him and see. And if it doesn’t work …”</p><p>If it didn’t work, then Owen would have to accept all over again that all the ordinary, run-of-the-mill pleasures of even eating and drinking were beyond him now.</p><p>“If it doesn’t work,” Jack said, “we could still find something else, later on down the line. I have a lot of exes, and I was almost always considerate enough to make breakfast. The right memory, the right answer, is out there somewhere.”</p><p>Tosh could fill in what they all weren’t saying: <em>unless it’s not. </em>Unless there <em>was </em>no answer. They’d all seen their share of bad endings.</p><p>But she wasn’t going to resign herself to anything, not yet. Not when they had an alien doughnut-maker at their disposal. She remembered the sense of electric wonderment she’d first had when she’d taken this job, the sense of endless, expansive possibilities. One of those could come through for Owen, still. <em>She</em> could come through for him. Not a perfect ending, but—one with the occasional doughnut. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.</p><p>"You test it again," she said. "I'll try to get us some more options."</p><p>She nipped out to the twenty-four-hour Sainsbury's and did an exploratory round of shopping, nabbing up every fresh or near-fresh thing she could think of: peaches, bananas, pears, cherries, plums, pomegranates, three different kinds of apples, onions, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, swedes, butter-glossed rolls from the bakery, some hideously-overpriced Greek yoghurt, and a cheese sampler.</p><p>They'd been productive at the Hub, too, turning out three more doughnuts: one rust-colored and made of cinnamon, one a wrinkled green-brown and made of tea leaves, and one dense, crumbly black one made of coffee beans.</p><p>This was going to work. It had to.</p><p>"No potatoes?" Jack said, as he and Ianto helped her unpack. Lacking cabinet space, he was resorting to putting onions in the drawer next to the oven mitt.</p><p>"No potatoes, no corn--nothing that would have to be cooked normally before you'd eat it. Not that you'd normally take a huge bite of a raw onion or sit down with a clove of garlic, but ... well, the menu's a work in progress." Owen liked garlic.</p><p>"I think it looks like quite a spread." He kissed her on the cheek and sauntered off, winding upstairs to his office.</p><p>By then, it was almost dawn, so she and Ianto packed up the food processor again. Ianto went off to share Jack’s bed, and—after reassuring them several times that she was completely fine—Tosh tucked herself up on the sofa. No point in going back to the flat when it would only be for a few hours, and they’d all grabbed a kip here before …</p><p>She woke up fuzzy-headed and found that someone had put a blanket over her. But there didn’t seem to be anyone else around.</p><p>Then Owen came in, carrying a cup of tea.</p><p>For a second, Tosh had a lurching sense that the last few weeks had been a dream: he was alive, and none of it had been true. Then he just set the tea down on the little table next to her head.</p><p>“I thought I remembered how you take it,” he said, and she noticed that he had no cup of his own. And his complexion was its new, paler shade: she’d never realized before all this how much ruddiness <em>life </em>added to someone’s face.</p><p>She struggled upright, dragging the blanket with her. “I didn’t know you ever knew.”</p><p>“There’s usually no point in it, with Ianto around, but he and Jack seem to be having a lie-in. God, I miss sex.”</p><p>“And tea?” Tosh said, almost hopefully, because she could at least <em>possibly </em>still offer him that.</p><p>“And tea, yeah. <em>Is </em>that right, by the way?”</p><p>She tested it with a few sips, and—almost to her surprise—it was. It tasted like heaven. “Yes, thanks. Were you … were you the one who put the blanket over me?”</p><p>He couldn’t flush any longer, but she thought he might have, then. He looked over her head, at the smooth bricks on the wall, and addressed them instead. “I couldn’t tell whether or not you were cold. I remembered it being cold down here, nights, but—I touched you, just your arm, and I couldn’t tell. Maybe she’ll feel hot as a stove to you, I thought, like I could burn myself touching you, but it’s all just tepid. Nothing. So I figured what the hell—if it was too hot for a blanket, you could always kick it off again. Did I wake you up?”</p><p>“Don’t think so. Though the tea would have gotten cold if you hadn’t.”</p><p>“The tea’s a bribe,” Owen said. “So that I <em>could </em>wake you up. It’s been an hour or so now, and this place is bloody deserted. One dead man wandering around, like the world’s saddest zombie movie. I even thought about attempting a proper fry-up, but the kitchen looks like a bomb hit it.” He recalibrated, maybe seeing her sleeping on the sofa in a new light: “Er, <em>did</em> a bomb hit it?”</p><p>“No. Just some … late-night snacking.”</p><p>“Well, I’m not cleaning up after you lot.”</p><p>“I don’t know that it’s really a strong moral stand when I’m not sure you’ve ever washed a dish in your life.”</p><p>“You do know how to take the wind out of somebody’s sails, Tosh.”</p><p>She sipped her tea. “Suppose I put it back again.” It wouldn’t be fair for her to spring the surprise before the others could join them, of course, but it was hard to resist building up a sense of anticipation. Even though it might be a fool’s game.</p><p>“What with, sex? We've just been through this, I’m literally not up for it. Another strike against sodding death.”</p><p>“I didn’t mean that,” Tosh said, blushing a bit. Although really, there'd stil lbe other ways, presumably. Actually, a scavenger hunt for alien sex toys or pharmaceuticals to fix this particular kind of erectile dysfunction did sound promising. She wouldn't mind spending a month or two on that. You found the most interesting things. But that would have to wait until later. She curved her hands around her teacup, letting the steam warm her fingers. “I just meant maybe something nice will happen to you today.”</p><p>“Not bloody likely.” But he studied her for a moment. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were serious. What is it? Somebody get me a shiny new scalpel? A new mousepad?”</p><p><em>Better</em>, she wanted to say, but she held back. She’d risk building his hopes up too high if she did that. “Mousepad, of course.” They were thankfully interrupted by Gwen, who came in yawning and brushing raindrops off her jacket. “Gwen!”</p><p>Owen held up one finger as Gwen came closer. “I’m telling you right now that I can’t cope with some cutesy tale of beautiful domesticity."</p><p>“Then you’ll be pleased to know that my alarm didn’t go off, I had to count on Rhys’s snoring to wake me, and all I’ve had to eat was a stale granola bar I found in my purse. I haven’t even spoken to him yet.”</p><p>“There, was that so difficult? Strife and inconvenience, Gwen, that’s much more relatable.”</p><p>Gwen snorted and then turned to Tosh. She started to say something, but then she must have caught the look on Tosh’s face. She mouthed, “It came?” and Tosh nodded. Gwen brightened, all the wrung-out sleepiness seeming to leave her in an instant.</p><p>“What <em>are </em>you two on about?” Owen said.</p><p>“Oh, nothing,” Gwen said, all-too-innocently.</p><p>Ianto and Jack came down the lift together, Ianto’s tie just askew enough—especially with Jack’s expression being even closer than usual to that of a cat who’d gotten into some cream—to suggest that they’d already had something of a morning.</p><p>Maybe her tea and blanket were tamer, but Tosh still felt a kind of kinship to them, like she’d had something of a morning herself. Now that they were all together again, there was a fizzy excitement in her that made her muscles draw tight with anticipation.</p><p>“Good, we’re all here,” Jack said. He flashed them a grin. “Toshiko, are we doing any kind of build-up?”</p><p>“A bit. Not really.”</p><p>“Fine by me. Then—” The grin brightened even further. “I brought doughnuts.”</p><p>It was less of a punchline if you had no idea what he was talking about, and Tosh saw it in the way Owen seemed to curl up on himself: he barely moved, but she could see him shrink back somehow once he thought he was no longer a part of whatever was going on. He sat down on the arm of the sofa and was silent.</p><p>“Kitchen, then,” Tosh said, and she reached out tentatively and put her hand on Owen’s arm.</p><p>He wore long sleeves so often now, even in hot weather, since it made no difference to him; since the cold wouldn’t have made a difference either, Tosh thought that the sleeves were a kind of armor. He’d gotten into the habit of flinching if one of them touched his bare skin. It wasn’t like they hurt him, it was like he thought that he was contaminated somehow. That they wouldn’t <em>want </em>to touch him, even if it seemed like they did, or that they’d change their minds the second they felt his newly cool skin. It made something inside Tosh ache.</p><p>“I don’t see the point of me tagging along,” Owen said waspishly. “I’m not in the mood to sit around and watch other people eat.”</p><p>“Good,” Ianto said. “Then my virtue is safe for another day.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t go that far,” Jack said.</p><p>“It isn’t like that, anyway,” Ianto said to Owen. “It’s different this time.” His gaze flickered over to Tosh, giving her the chance to finish it. He knew what it meant to her.</p><p>“We think we found a way for you to have something to eat,” Tosh said.</p><p>Owen stared at her. “You wouldn’t joke about that,” he said, almost to himself. “Not you. Not any of you, I reckon.”</p><p>“No,” Jack said softly.</p><p>Gwen said, “Never.”</p><p>“All right.” He stood up, moving carefully, as if he might break before he had the chance to see if they were right. “So what is it, then?”</p><p>“Alien cheese grater,” Ianto said.</p><p>“That makes everything come out like doughnuts. We think,” Tosh added, because it was true that they hadn't had a respectable sample size for their testing.</p><p>It wasn’t much of a walk to their little kitchenette, but it was long enough for Jack to sketch in a lesson on the Troxian life-cycle. Owen nodded along, but Tosh had the idea he wasn’t really listening. His mind was a whiteout right now, a question waiting for an answer. Hope waiting to be crushed. God, she needed them to be right about this.</p><p>“I didn’t know about the doughnuts part,” Gwen was saying. “I can’t believe I was sound asleep while the three of you were making alien pastries.”</p><p>“Most of it was just pouring two-week-old coleslaw through it and straight onto the counter,” Ianto said. “You may want to be grateful you were asleep.” He eased into the kitchen ahead of them and produced the cheese grater.</p><p>That was the first thing in a while to get a response from Owen. “It’s an alien artifact and you’re just keeping it in the cupboard next to the sugar.”</p><p>“It’s kitchen equipment. A place for everything and everything in its place, my mum taught me. Besides, if it works out, you’ll be using it regularly, won’t you? It wouldn’t be practical to fetch it up from the archives every time.” He put it on the table and slid a plate under it. "Tosh picked up a few things last night—it only seems to work with natural food, not anything heavily processed. Do you want to choose what goes through first, or—”</p><p>“No,” Owen said immediately. He dropped into the chair like he didn't trust his legs to hold him up. “No, for God’s sake. Anything.”</p><p>Ianto looked to Tosh, and she reached out almost without looking. Bananas, right there on the counter. She peeled one, the smooth rubbery peel giving way to the soft and slightly bruised fruit; she fed it into the Troxian device.</p><p>
  <em>It's not going to work. It's not going to work.</em>
</p><p>But when Ianto lifted the grater up, there was a plump, pale yellow doughnut. No cinnamon-sugar-like coating this time, Tosh noticed, but it had little brownish threads coming off it.</p><p>“Did you try it?” Owen said. He didn’t take his eyes off the doughnut.</p><p>Jack answered. “I did. Not exactly something where I’d go back for seconds, but it’s not meant for me. Troxi not in their third-stage of life—”</p><p>“The living.”</p><p>“—don’t eat it either.”</p><p>“But they’re aliens, of course. Completely different biology.”</p><p>“True. But none of your human biology is really what’s keeping you alive right now.”</p><p>“I don’t know what’ll happen if I can’t digest this,” Owen said, finally picking it up. His hands were steady—it was the doctor in him, Tosh realized. No matter how nervous he was, his hands stayed under control. “I don’t suppose you remember whether or not your undead Troxi could shit all this out or not.”</p><p>“Sorry, asking that <em>really </em>didn’t fit the mood I was going for. Nothing led me to believe she couldn't; I laid out a whole buffet against the bedspread and she ate her way through almost all of it.”</p><p>“Either it works or it doesn’t,” Gwen said. “But it has to be worth trying, doesn’t it?”</p><p>Owen’s chin dipped in a fraction of a nod, and his free hand groped out to the left. It took Tosh a moment to realize he was reaching for her. He was letting himself need this, need touch, comfort, even though he'd been so worried they were squeamish about him. She held his hand, interlacing their fingers and holding on tight. It didn’t matter that he felt cool. It wasn’t a corpse’s hand. it was just Owen’s, and she was so overwhelmingly glad to have him back, to have him alive, have him <em>there</em>.</p><p>Owen ate the doughnut the same way Jack had: all in one bite, all or nothing. He was holding Tosh’s hand so hard now he might leave bruises.</p><p>She watched him, her heart in her throat.</p><p>His eyes didn’t close all the way, not like Jack’s; his eyelashes just fluttered, eyelids twitching like he was having some kind of intense dream.</p><p>When he spoke, his voice was thick, stunned.</p><p>“Banana bread.”</p><p>He looked at them. He could still cry, a bit, and he was crying now.</p><p>“Like fresh-baked banana bread. All cakey, sweet and moist and—<em>banana</em>. I could <em>taste </em>it.”</p><p>They all erupted into a kind of spontaneous cheer, and Owen turned the rest of the distance between him and Tosh into nothing, wrapping his arms around her. He was still seated while she was standing, so his damp face was tucked against her stomach, his forehead rucking up her shirt a bit, pushing the hem out from the band of her skirt. She could feel his lips moving, but she didn't know what he was saying. She wasn't sure anything could have mattered as much as this, anyway; she stroked his hair, her fingers combing through the short-cut silkiness of it.</p><p>Finally, he stood up, moving his arms until they wrapped around her shoulders instead. His cheek was cool against hers; he had no breath to stir her hair.</p><p>She might have had a hundred hugs from him over the years, but this one was her favorite.</p><p>Though she felt she had to say <em>something</em>. “I didn’t do anything more than anyone else, you know. Just the shopping, really."</p><p>“Don’t care,” Owen said against her ear. “You’re my—God, I was going to say lifeline. Unbelievable. Anyway, I don’t care. You’re amazing.” He separated himself then, and he looked at them all with shining, wet eyes. “Thanks. I don’t know what to say … except let’s do it some more, dammit.”</p><p>Jack laughed. “First things first,” he said, and he pulled Owen to his feet and hugged him as firmly as Owen had hugged Tosh.</p><p>Then Owen got an armful of Gwen.</p><p>“Ianto?” Owen said, holding out one arm.</p><p>“I’m not much of a hugger,” Ianto said. “And I’ve been busy making you different doughnuts for the last five minutes, if you’d like to get around to tasting them.” He offered Owen one of his brief, lovely smiles.</p><p>Owen got a look at the plate of six doughnuts and grabbed Ianto’s hand again, planting an enthusiastic kiss on it. “Ianto, you’re beautiful.” He picked up one of the doughnuts, white and squishy-looking, and raised his eyebrows.</p><p>"Brie," Ianto said.</p><p>Owen bit into it. His smile, thank God, stayed in place.</p><p>"Tell us what it tastes like, man," Gwen said. "I've never in my life imagined a brie doughnut."</p><p>"Creamy, rich. <em>Dense</em>. I'd say I don't think I could eat too much of it, but at the moment, I don't give a shit. I'll eat myself sick." He finished off the doughnut and looked at the remainders. "You made a color wheel."</p><p>"There was no harm in putting together an aesthetically pleasing plate."</p><p>"All right, what are they, then?"</p><p>Ianto pointed at each in turn, going clockwise around the plate. "Peach. Carrot. Cherry. Heirloom tomato. Coffee."</p><p>"The fruit ones might taste better," Tosh said apologetically, "but I thought you might want a range of flavors. Now that we know it's worked out, we can try it with cooked foods, too. You could have steak and chips if you don't mind eating them in doughnut form."</p><p>"I love doughnuts. They're downright heavenly." He deliberately disrupted Ianto's color wheel, plucking out the cherry doughnut from the middle instead of going on to the peach. Tosh suspected that Ianto's sigh was exaggerated, but she couldn't know for sure.</p><p>The cherry doughnut was dark red on the outside and softly pink within, with some of the juiciness of a real cherry: like eating cake soaked in golden syrup, Owen said. The taste was off, though, because Ianto had dropped a clutch of cherries in, stems and stones and all, and while the processor had made them edible, it had also added a woody, grassy taste to the cherries' sweetness. ("I feel like I've become one of those twats talking about wine," Owen said, but he didn't stop explaining: the words tumbled out one after another as though he couldn't have stopped even if he'd wanted to. He'd been craving meal-time conversation almost as much as meals, Tosh realized. He had missed having a life to talk about, had missed <em>them</em>. Oh, Owen.)</p><p>The carrot doughnut was dry, and unlike the banana, it tasted more like itself than like something baked from it. That was the only time the texture seemed to throw Owen off: there was something bloody wrong, he said, about eating something that tasted exactly like carrot but didn't have any snap. The peach doughnut dripped with sweet juice, and unlike with the cherries, the machine hadn't spread the pit taste around: the pit itself was neatly in the dimple at the center, wrinkled and untouched. The tomato one seemed to scratch some savory itch in him that the carrot one hadn't, and he looked not only joyful now but also <em>hungry</em>, like he'd woken his stomach up again.</p><p>He'd saved the coffee doughnut--grainy and black as it had been the night before--for last, and it ended with him immediately spitting it back out.</p><p>"That was <em>perfectly good </em>coffee," Ianto said.</p><p>"Maybe you want to eat coffee grounds all on their own, but the rest of us don't." He wiped at his mouth. "God, it tasted like a lorry driver's tongue."</p><p>"Since when have you been off snogging lorry drivers?" Gwen said.</p><p>"I do all right," Owen said. For the first time in a long time, he didn't immediately pivot; he didn't change it to past tense. "Any bloody driver should be so lucky."</p><p>Something of Owen had survived too, and there was more of it today than there had been yesterday. He was buoyant in a way she hadn’t seen in weeks. <em>Hopeful</em>. Like the rest of his life, or unlife, would be worth living after all.</p><p>They could try all kinds of things, Tosh thought. Cooked potato doughnut, with a sour cream doughnut and a butter doughnut. He could crumble up a brie doughnut onto a cracker one. You could even do cream and sugar doughnuts to try to make the coffee ones more palatable. It was a future laid out in breakfasts and lunches and dinners, and if it was a bit monotonous, if it always came up doughnuts, that was just life, wasn't it? It might not have been perfect, but it had put a glow in Owen's face, a beautiful and uncanny witch-light that seemed to have nothing to do with his body, nothing to do with cheeks that wouldn't flush and a complexion that would never change. It was just him.</p><p>Tosh put her hands on his shoulders, holding him like that, and he tilted his head back to smile up at her. He looked as young as she’d ever seen him.</p><p>“Sit down,” he said. “Come up with what I ought to try next; we'll be like mad scientists together. I'll make you another cup of tea."</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>